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Friday Night Lights (2004) More at IMDbPro »

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270 comments in total

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68 out of 88 people found the following comment useful :-
A sports movie worthy of non-sports people, 7 December 2004

Author: trillian28 from Encino, CA

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This movie is not what you might expect. It is not your typical sports movie, where a disparate team comes together to triumph over adversity as the music swells with a dumb sense of pride. This is a movie about people, kind of like Seabiscuit that way, except less happy and with no horses.

This movie is about Odessa, a medium-sized town in Texas with no economy and nothing to do besides obsess about high school football. It is a town where they pay the football coach twice as much as their teachers, where a boy's best chance out is to get a football scholarship to a faraway college, and where these boys are under so much pressure to win because the town seems unable to succeed at anything else.

A movie like this depends on its actors, because it is a character drama at its core. Much noise has been made of Billy Bob, and how he gives a great performance, and this is very true, but he is not the only star in this movie. The boys all do a great job too, especially Lucas Black. I have never noticed this actor before, but he is so intense as Mike Winchell that he makes you really feel for him. The other boys, including Derek Luke and Jay Hernandez, are also note-perfect.

There is a great moment at the end, after their final game, when they talk about what they are going to do next. They haven't graduated yet, but it is already over for them. There is a sense that nothing else matters. Subtitles tell us what happens to everyone. It is sometimes funny, often tragic, and always ironic, and you leave the movie feeling like you've met some new people who are very real.

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59 out of 84 people found the following comment useful :-
Nice football drama, 11 October 2004

Author: MichaelB (cream_of_the_wheat@hotmail.com) from Athens, Georgia

I don't think I've ever enjoyed Billy Bob Thornton's character in any movie as much as I did here. For once I didn't find him totally obnoxious. FNL was a great drama which used that same gritty style in 8 Mile and actually featured characters with emotional depth. I'm not a football fan at all really but this one kept me on the edge of my seat. It's also great in that it shows all of the outcomes and possibilities of high schoolers playing football, which becomes crucial in character development. You also feel the heat coming from the townfolk who live by and practically worship football and how it affects the boys. Great story, great acting, great direction, and very entertaining, every last bit. 8/10.

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41 out of 56 people found the following comment useful :-
The Real Varsity Blues, 9 February 2005
Author: zatz-1 from United States

This is a very dark sports movie. It's about fanaticism, the great weight of importance certain people place on sports. Sports fans often regard their teams as extensions of themselves. In "Friday Night Lights," the entire town of Odessa, Texas collectively puts their town's reputation on the shoulders of a high school football team. It's basically the same exact plot as "Varsity Blues," except a serious version of high school football in small town Texas.

One thing the movie does extremely well is taking hackneyed plots of the individual players (because it's all been done before) and putting them all in the background. So the plots play out not in a cheesy, inspirational, in-your-face way. Instead, they are just there with only as much attention as the viewer wants to put on them. The great aspects of sports are enough to keep us interested and makes the movie incredibly real.

The only character whose plot is really focused on is Boobie, the cocky running back who is injured and tries to defy his own injury. This is a plot in sports movies that has been focused on somewhat - the injured player. But never before has the pain been so real and so powerful.

This movie is heart-wrenching. Sports movies usually have so many moments of redemption and cheesy happiness that often feel false. This movie only has one such moment and it is incredibly powerful. Nothing about this movie is Hollywood. Billy Bob Thorton gives a great, understated performance as the coach, a man who is simply internal, who can do nothing but sit back and watch events unfold, knowing full well the impact that each game has on himself and his family. All the actors playing the football players do a good job, especially the guy who plays Boobie.

Don't expect this movie to uplift you. But it will show you an interesting side of sports you may have never considered. And, in the end, it shows exactly what is great about sports, and it has nothing to do with winning or making a career out of the game. It's about giving all you have for a teammate.

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48 out of 75 people found the following comment useful :-
The Best Sports movie ever made, 10 October 2004

Author: espenshade55

This movie was phenomenal in every way. It had incredible performances under a great director with a fantastic story to back it up.

It tells the story of a high school football team in Texas through the course of their 1988 season. Billy Bob Thorton played the coach of the team and give the best performance I've ever seen him give. The film was directed by Peter Berg who gave it a unique film style. He managed to tell this story in a very beautiful way.

Tim McGraw gives a great debut performance of an ex-high school football player who has become the drunken abusive father of one of the players currently on the team. He was almost unrecodnizable in this role and he portrayed it well. He, and the rest of the cast for that matter deserve a lot of credit.

This is the only football film I have ever seen that has done justice to what it feels like to play football in high school. I played under Friday night lights myself, that time of my life ended just a year ago and it still holds fresh in my memory. And because of that I can tell you how accurately this film portray's the sense of brotherhood and friendship that is felt by every team, at least every good football team.

Whether you ever played under Friday night lights yourself or not anyone should be able to appreciate this film.

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36 out of 54 people found the following comment useful :-
Excellent Look at a Small Town's Football Madness, 9 October 2004

Author: Doris Bell (jabell) from Olney, MD

To be honest, I went to this movie primarily to see Christian Kane, but the reviews had been excellent. I expected a cross between All the Right Moves and Remember the Titans, but it was nothing like the second, which was about two coaches forced to make their teams blend into one while avoiding racial problems. There were elements of All the Right Moves, though, as several of the young men expressed their desire to get out of Odessa through football, but the movie focused on several of them rather than just one. Its best companion piece in my opinion is the Texas Cheerleader Murder, which shows the same football madness from the other gender as they will do anything to be cheerleaders!

Billy Bob Thornton was excellent as the coach, facing pressure on all sides to win the state championship. An excellent touch was the large number of for sale signs on his lawn after his team was blown away in the game following Boobie's injury. The community put pressure on the boys as well, everyone who owned a state championship ring from prior years pushing them in the kids' faces. Tim McGraw was a revelation as Brian's abusive father, and the actress who was Mike Winchell's mother gave a brilliant performance.

All of the young actors were excellent, especially Derek Luke as the unfortunate Boobie. He made the audience feel his pain and frustration. Lucas Black, who had done such a marvelous job in American Gothic, has a face that reflects his pain as he faces all of his tribulations, which include the pressure of suddenly becoming the team's best hope when Boobie is out and of having a mother with mental and/or emotional problems. Every one of them is a gem.

The cinematography was outstanding, and the shots of the town and the bleak surroundings certainly demonstrated why the kids wanted to get away. Despair hung in the air, with people clinging to their moments of glory as the only happy days of their entire lives. This was its primary likeness to All the Right Moves, although the hated home town was a Pennsylvania steel town (Johnstown, PA, which I escaped from myself), not a Texas prairie city.

And what made things even more intense was that this was a true story. Showing the boys' fates at the end was an excellent conclusion.

And Christian Kane? I knew he only had a cameo, as he had told Peter Berg that he'd love to be in the movie and would take any part there was. He was the man in the restaurant/bar who asked Mike Winchell if he'd take a picture with him & his kid. He was long-haired, unshaven, and, to be honest, if I'd seen him this way first, I'd never have given him a second look. He did a good job as a "good ole boy," though!

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15 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
Rack Focus is out of bounds, 6 March 2005
Author: marcvarr from United States

The reason Varsity Blues is so much like Friday Night Lights is b/c VB is a fictional story which was written 10 years after the true story of FNL took place in Odessa, TX in 1988.

The game faces worn by the players in FNL are genuine. The "Religion" of High School Football gave them no other choice. H.G. Bissinger spent almost an entire year with his family in 1988 in Odessa, TX. He essentially became a part of the community and team in documenting and then writing his book Friday Night Lights. He said that due to depressed economic conditions, lack of higher education, and good paying jobs, the communities in West Texas looked upon the high school football programs as saviors from reality.

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13 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
This movie sucked., 10 February 2005

Author: Van Buren from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

It was full of plot holes, inaccuracies (doesn't the time-clock stop for injured players or loss of helmets in Texas football games?) and not so much redemption (So Your Dad Beats the Crap out of You? Well, do something right for once and then he will Love You and make it all worthwhile).

Either make the movie about a team and its quest for a championship OR make a movie about a player within a team and his personal struggle but instead, this movie tried to do it all and came up more than a couple yards short. The book probably showed the whole story much better; the movie should have picked one element of the story and stuck with that.

Instead, the movie jumped from one character dialogue to flashes of game play and then another character dialogue months later without actually telling you who people were or why they were important--the QB calling his sibling to take care of the mother--whatever happened with that? Because the mother was coherent by the end of the final game, does that mean she's not crazy anymore? Its one redeeming quality was the soundtrack. Buy that and then watch SportsCenter highlights while Iggy Pop plays in the background.

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7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Adequate Football film, but generic and disappointing., 6 September 2005

Author: dmc42c from Columbia, MO

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I have to say first of all that I had high expectations for this movie. I heard it was supposed to be a very realistic film about high school football. Having heard that, I had in mind a high school equivalent of a movie like Any Given Sunday, which I felt was amazing in representing on-field play and (I imagine) very good about off-the-field goings on. I must say that FNL didn't represent High School football the way I remember it. I played for a fairly small school (about 500 students) in a small but supportive town of 6000. I remember we had about 2000 spectators for one game. The kind of football represented in Friday Night Lights is the kind that may be authentic for the large and rabid Texas town in which it is set, but a brand which seems to me closer to college football than the high school football that I and probably most others remember playing.

I think the weakest part of the movie was the character development. By the end, you could tell that certain players were supposed to have been main characters, but yet you're left with a very empty and superficial understanding of who they are. For example, there was one character (who I won't name to avoid any kind of spoiler) who we find out in text at the end went on to a very prestigious profession, and yet we had been left with no particular impression that he was smart or ambitious from the movie to that point. In fact, I felt that I knew almost nothing about the character at all. I did feel a connection to one character, Don Billingsly, although I thought even that was a bit underdone, and to the quarterback Mike Winchell to a lesser extent.

The on-field and other football aspects of the film were alright, although I think a bit generic. They are not particularly inspired though, and don't convey the raw emotion and excitement of being on the field particularly well. I don't know, but I am left to suspect that the director and/or cinematographer may not have experienced high school football themselves.

All that being said, it was still a decent movie. I don't feel I wasted my time in watching it or anything, but it certainly did fall short of expectations, and certainly is not of the same caliber as Any Given Sunday, or even The Program.

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10 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
An incomplete pass, 17 October 2006

Author: (hoodcsa@aol.com) from Georgia

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

There are some nice touches here, things like the idiots calling in on the radio shows and "for sale" signs on the family's lawn after a loss. But overall I was disappointed. I haven't read the book so I don't know how to compare it with the film, but on its on the movie left me flat. Billy Bob underplays his part nicely, but I NEVER got a sense that this was a veteran high school football coach at one of the more high pressure, high profile programs in Texas. I love that actor who played the QB, but again never saw him as a player of the caliber he was supposed to be. Mostly, he just screwed up. The way Permian suddenly started playing well in the playoffs didn't make any sense. The assistant coaches were non-entities (as they almost always are in football movies.) Would a high school coach not check with a star player's doctor himself if there was an injury question? The flashy black tailback (Booby) and the quiet but powerful black lineman (Preacher) are almost stock characters, though both are well acted. Actually the most interesting character was the Hispanic defensive back, but the movie didn't do anything with him. The climactic game was highly dubious. It's hard to imagine a team being that physically dominant and then suddenly getting pounded for the last two quarters, Again, I didn't read the book, but the movie overplayed Carter's viciousness. Don't refs in Texas throw flags for that stuff? There were more things in this film I liked and more I disliked, but overall it was a disappointment. The great high school football movie remains to be made. I guess I'll have to write it myself.

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10 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Disappointing....., 31 December 2004

Author: anonymous12 from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This movie was very disappointing in that several elements of the book were wrongly done. The main story is the same but there are several flaws that hurt the movie.

1) Boobie Miles gets injured in the beginning of the story in a preseason game at Texas Tech. This means he won't get anything done during the season at all and Chris Comer comes up sooner on the team.

2) The game against Marshall was lost at Marshall. The team depicted as Marshall was actually Midland High one of Permian's main rivals and here is the proof- Marshall High is the Mavericks colored Scarlet and Silver, Midland High is the Bulldogs colored Purple and Gold. Look at the jerseys and you will see who it is. Also the real Marshall High's football roster is overwhelmingly Black, the team shown was racially mixed like Midland High.

3) Permian only loses to Midland Lee by one point in district play. Midland Lee loses to Midland High and Midland High loses to Permian. These are the teams that set up the coin toss as such.

4) Boobie comes back on the team as a reserve to Chris Comer and after not getting any playing time in the Midland Lee game, he quits the team completely at half time and never stands on the sideline or goes to any games again.

5) Brian Chavez was a Tight End and Defensive End who wore #85 not a Tight End and Strong Safety. In addition, Boobie wore #35 and Ivory Christian wore #62.

6) The coaches end up liking Chris Comer as a player more than Boobie because he has a better lifting ethic and runs more straight up plays the way the staff prefers him too, this is in part why Boobie quits the team.

7) Dallas Carter is played in Austin at Darrell K. Royal Memorial stadium where UT plays in the state semi-finals not the state finals. Carter wins the state title but is forced to forfeit due to an ineligible player.

The acting is done pretty well but if you read the book, you will see these flaws are pretty true. I am also tired of hearing all the PC hypocrites out there complain about the depiction of Dallas Carter's football team. The team according to the book is as large, monstrous, talented, and black as the movie shows. People say it is a racist depiction but reading the book, you see a true depiction of the team. The story is very altered giving this movie a score of 3.5/10.

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